مطالب

Through this paper, the need of a good friend has been discussed by taking evidence from Islamic sources. This evidence then is further reinforced through the discussion of sociological, cognitive and psychological research findings. The introduction of this paper briefly sheds light on how Islam is a complete code of life and how friends have played an important role in expanding and sustaining this code. Furthermore the introduction shortly discusses the need for friends as identified via contemporary sociological research. The main theme of the presents references from the Holy Quran and Sunnah through which the need of having and being a good friend in human life is critically explored. Lastly, conclusion of the paper sums up the discussion and presents recommendations through which the element of friendship can be effectively incorporated in one’s life.

In response to the competitive demands for establishing their international academic and financial credentials, the universities globally distribute some online introductory information about themselves. To this end, the university homepages have increasingly turned into the rhetorical space for the development of promotional academic texts in recent years. In this study, we examined university overview genre that provides the visitors with brief presentation of the simple facts while endorsing a specific perspective of the university and strengthening its position in the academic community. The corpus comprised 70 overviews extracted from the academic websites of the first top 500 universities. We analyzed and coded the texts to specify their overall rhetorical framework, functional moves and constituting steps, and optimal order of moves. The findings indicated that overview genre incorporates six obligatory moves including 'source of reputation', 'historical origin', 'current status of development', 'commitments, goals and orientations', 'global state', and 'services and supports'. Also, the results demonstrated that the academic genre did not follow a single, invariant pattern of sequenced moves in a clearly linear order. The findings further suggest that the nature of overview genre could be characterized by its twofold informative and persuasive functions. Finally, implications of the findings of the study are presented